Implementation of a Scholarly Information Portal Using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting

In June 2001, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was awarded funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to create a portal to facilitate access to scholarly cultural heritage information. The project was designed to investigate the efficacy of harvesting and aggregating metadata using the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (PMH). Between its start date and its conclusion in May 2003, the project accomplished the following: * Developed robust, scalable tools supporting the harvest and aggregation of metadata. * Investigated issues relating to value-added metadata normalization, portal search interface design, presentation of search results, and integration of Encoded Archival Description (EAD) metadata with Dublin Core (DC) metadata * Sampled range of metadata authoring practices in domain of cultural heritage. * Demonstrated technical viability of search and retrieval across an aggregation of descriptive metadata harvested using the OAI-PMH. * Identified critical issues relating to use of OAI-PMH in domain of cultural heritage. * Tested usefulness and usability of search portal with one target user population. * Implemented infrastructure to maintain metadata search portal after end of project.Andrew W. Mellon FoundationOpe